Get Your Ronin On: Kurosawa at 100

Cinephiles and/or cinephiles’ loved ones, be warned. When it comes to finding new ways to break your recession-frazzled budget, the Criterion Collection is going for the championship this year. Brimming with no less than 25 Akira Kurosawa movies inside one heck of an elegant sienna-on-black box, which also includes a handsome 96-page coffeetable book, AK 100 could be the most sumptuous DVD package devoted so far to a single director.

Consumers gritting their teeth to shell out the $399 (!) list price as Christmas bears down like a freight train should know that at one level the sumptuousness is illusory. Each title rates a separate disc, but extras are nonexistent. Since blue-chip lagniappe is a Criterion specialty and there’s been plenty of it on their stand-alone editions of several Kurosawa titles, the hidden scrimping here is puzzling. While I’m not one to clamor for audio commentaries, in this case I’d have welcomed more detailed glosses than the accompanying book has room for; it’s not as if film-scholar blather is all that pricey, after all.

But that cavil aside, let’s be honest. For any movie lover, AK 100 is a treasure trove. With one major exception—Ran, the 1985 variant on King Lear that certified Kurosawa’s late-life status as an Old Master—all the must-sees are here, from 1950’s Rashomon and 1954’s epoch-making Seven Samurai through 1980’s Kagemusha. In between are a whole bunch of should-sees, including 1958’s The Hidden Fortress (the unlikely inspiration for Star Wars) and the magnificent 1963 kidnap thriller High and Low (cribbed from in more movies than I can count, including Ron Howard’s Ransom).

The best bait of all is the four new-to-DVD movies Kurosawa directed before Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Despite having being made under severe restrictions—not only political but, since Japan was losing the war by then, economic—these early works are striking displays of his already recognizable signature: the bold compositions and editing brio, the fascination with the dynamics of insular groups within a larger society. Not to mention the infectious jones for dramatic landscapes and weather: At least in the sound era, nobody used wind, fog and rain to better effect.

Set in 19th-century Yokohama, his first film, Sanshiro Sugata, dramatizes the rivalry between judo and jujitsu schools of martial arts as a contest between modernity and tradition—a theme that, in various forms, was to preoccupy this ultra-modern but yesterday-fetishizing filmmaker throughout his career. Aside from a terrific pair of crackpot Kabuki villains, its 1944 sequel, Sanshiro Sugata, Part Two—also, like its predecessor, starring the ingratiating Susumu Fujita, an early Kurosawa regular until the director’s definitive actor, Toshiro Mifune, displaced him—is less inventive. What’s uncannily interesting today are its anti-U.S. subplots: a loutish Yankee sailor getting his comeuppance in the opening scene, an exhibition match against a visiting American bor later on. You can’t help but wonder where Kurosawa found actors to play these parts in wartime Japan.

In between came The Most Beautiful, a piece of home-front propaganda about selfless young women laboring in an optics factory for the war effort’s sake. Yet even here, Kurosawa gets some marvelous effects: intimations of strain and frayed nerves, tonal shifts between the women’s behavior in the dorm and at work, the chipper goofiness of their daily fife-and-drum marches from one to the other. The melancholy undertone also hints he knew perfectly well by then that all this sacrifice was for nothing. Or almost, since the movie’s female lead, Yoko Yaguchi, ended up as Mrs. Kurosawa.

The most predictive of the batch, however, is 1945’s The Men Who Tread on The Tiger’s Tail, the sketch version of every samurai flick he made down the road. Among other things, Tiger’s Tail introduces the quasi-Shakespearean device he was to use if not overuse again and again: a lowlife foil, played here by a 1930s Japanese comedy star with panicky facial contortions Jerry Lewis would envy, whose lack of couth and unfettered survival instinct both undercuts and stresses his warrior cohorts’ nobility. The most heroic version of this character is Mifune’s extravagant role as the wannabe who attaches himself to the protagonists in Seven Samurai, but clownish and/or pathetic variants on the idea aren’t what you’d call under-represented in Kurosawa’s oeuvre.

The story of smuggling a royal personage to safety is also virtually identical to that of The Hidden Fortress, one of the most purely enjoyable movies in his filmography and one of the first I popped in when AK 100 landed with an intimidating thud on my porch. Maybe George Lucas meant to pay Kurosawa homage by transforming the comedy-relief sidekicks enlisted by Mifune’s protective general into R2-D2 and C-3PO, but this Star Wars nonfan can’t help wishing Lucas had learned more from his model’s visual energy and wonderful use of topography to evoke situation and mood. And Kurosawa’s vinishly sexy young heroine—a spoiled-brat Her Royal Highness who confesses as they’re all about to be ecuted at the climax that she’s had the time of her life during their adventures, not so incidentally proving she’ll make a good ruler now—leaves Princess Leia looking like Daisy Duck.

Kurosawa’s samurai and feudal epics will always bulk the largest in his legacy. To several generations of Western moviegoers, that iconography—the banners, the massed horsemen, the ribbed armor and flanged helmets—doesn’t spell "Japan" or even "history" so much as "Kurosawa." Despite his fabled admiration for John Ford, the influence in the other direction has been more consequential: Neither Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch nor (at a considerably lesser level) Mel Gibson’s Braveheart, to name just two, would exist without Kurosawa’s electrifying innovations in staging and editing violent spectacle. But AK 100 brings home how much variety he found in the genre, from the robust comic cynicism of 1961’s Yojimbo (the unofficial template for Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars) to the barbaric splendors of his 1957 Macbeth adaptation, Throne of Blood—the one that famously ends with Mifune perforated by dozens of arrows at once.

The set also puts things in perspective by including all those other movies Kurosawa found time to make, from adaptations of Gorky (The Lower Depths) and Dostoevsky (The Idiot) to a sequence of films tracing modern Japan’s progress from postwar despair to cynical affluence. Along with High and Low, one whose timeliness hasn’t noticeably faded is 1960’s The Bad Sleep Well, a complicated saga of corporate corruption and private revenge that pits a venal tycoon against Mifune as his enigmatic new son-in-law. The opening wedding-banquet sequence is a 20-minute tour de force that takes in a gaggle of reporters playing Greek chorus, a flunky’s arrest, the bride’s invalidism, her brother’s drunken loyalty and the arrival of an anonymously sent wedding cake whose design, Hamlet-style, points to the crime in the ecutive’s past. Two other set-pieces nearly as good are an alleged suicide’s miserable attendance at his own funeral and a reminiscent scene in the ruins of an armaments factory where the hero and his best chum worked in their youth until the Americans bombed it to smithereens—a time whose "innocence" they now miss.

Even so, the resolution of The Bad Sleep Well is more melodrama than tragedy, pointing up one of Kurosawa’s abiding limitations. With all his range and voracity, he’s a fairly shallow thinker. Does anyone this side of impressionable high-schoolers still find Rashomon’s exploration of subjective truths profound, as opposed to brilliantly handled? Even when his situations resonate, the emotions they provoke are seldom complex or troubling—with some obvious exceptions, like the kidnaper’s fierce underground-man prison monologue in High and Low. That’s why Kurosawa and his best-known star were so well matched: Mifune had few equals at physicality and bravado, but he’s still an actor whose idea of conveying reflectiveness is to speak in a conversational tone of voice for a change.

If I’m no huge devotee of Kagemusha or Ran despite their visual splendors, that’s partly because their stateliness calls attention to their skimpiness of thought. While it may sound heretical, I also don’t think working in color did much for Kurosawa’s strengths; it brought out the simple-minded side of his love of pageantry instead. Simply as monuments to their maker’s longevity and prowess, they’re obviously impressive. But if you want to appreciate Kurosawa’s true glories, AK 100 is by far the more imposing memorial.

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